Incels—men who identify as involuntarily celibate—have long dominated conversations about loneliness and sex, both within the manosphere and on the broader internet.
But the data shows that young women, too, are having less sex. According to the National Survey of Family Growth, sexlessness among young adult women between the ages of 22 and 34 rose by roughly 50 percent from 2013 to 2023. The share of young women who hadn’t had sex in the past year climbed from 8 percent to 13 percent during that decade.
Their reasons for abstaining range from anxiety about the state of the world—the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the current political and economic climate—to a desire for total autonomy. While both genders experience similar rates of loneliness, studies have shown that single women tend to be happier than single men, possibly due to not having to deal with a disproportionate amount of household labor or deprioritize their sexual pleasure.
Online, the vocabulary is coalescing: femcel, boysober, opting out.
WIRED spoke to a trio of people who are very online about their celibacy—a career porn star taking a break from men, an asexual ex-Mormon YouTuber, and an entrepreneur who is saving herself for marriage—and are helping normalize it for the masses.
Dominique Silver isn’t someone you’d normally think of as being celibate.
Silver, a trans woman and supermodel, has been a porn star for around two decades and is a Pornhub brand ambassador, performing under the name Natassia Dreams. But over the past year, Silver hasn’t been intimate with anyone, personally or professionally. Silver also models, and many of her friends, including cisgender supermodels, are in a similar situation. “A lot of my girlfriends are not entertaining men right now,” she says from her sage green New York City apartment, featuring a closet with rows of Louboutins with Labubus tucked into them.
Silver genuinely loved sex for a long time. “I was having the time of my life,” she says. “A lot of my scenes, people say ‘I can tell you are not acting.’ And I wasn’t.” However, two decades in the industry showed her sides of men she can’t unsee. She watched men spin elaborate lies to their partners, and she watched friends’ relationships unravel due to infidelity.
Silver in her living room with her Pomeranian.
Leading up to Silver’s decision to be celibate, she flew to Brazil to meet a woman she’d been chatting with and a man she was hoping to build a long-distance relationship with. When she got there, both flaked out on meeting up. “It just made me reevaluate everything,” she says. After that, she started closing in on herself, turning into a “hermit.” She got a job as a hostess to force herself back out of the house and to meet people in person instead of through apps. On dating apps, about four in 10 people who match with her recognize her from her work in porn. “They make me uncomfortable,” she says, “because I’m not meeting them as that person.”
Silver says she grew up with trauma that created an anxious attachment style, a pattern where fear of abandonment drives people to seek constant reassurance in relationships. Now she’s in a cleansing stage. “Every person you sleep with, you take a little piece of them,” she says. “I feel like you need clear space, and you need to be comfortable alone before you start dealing with other people.”
She has a theory about why so many women around her are arriving at the same place. Women don’t need men the way they once did, she says. Not for jobs, housing, credit, or stability.
Silver at home. The portrait on the wall behind her is of herself, painted by the artist Alejandro Poveda.
She can describe exactly what she wants: someone who doesn’t flinch at her shine, who is honest, genuine, and not intimidated by what she’s built. She thinks she’ll know when she meets them, but doesn’t expect it to happen soon.
As for having sex again, she’s not in a rush. “I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow,” she says. “I don’t think it will happen this year. Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not, and that’s OK.”
Saga in their bedroom, where they also create their YouTube content.
Growing up in the LDS church, Lynn Saga’s very first youth group lesson, at age 12, was on the law of chastity. They sat there totally unbothered.
“I thought I was the best Mormon in the world,” says the 29-year-old non-binary YouTuber. They describe their family as “pioneer stock” Mormons, with ancestors who made the pioneer trek to Salt Lake. “I was like, I’m already closer to God than all of these people.”
It took a couple more years to figure out why.
Saga was 13 when they heard the word “asexual” through a friend. The term gave them a way to describe something that had made them feel fractured for years. Saga now identifies as demisexual, a label under the asexual umbrella that describes people who only experience sexual attraction after forming a deep emotional bond. They estimate it takes them six to nine months to develop sexual attraction toward someone, if it happens at all. They say they’ve felt sexual attraction around three times in their life.
In 2020, Saga started a YouTube channel focused on asexuality. At the time they could barely find anyone else talking about it online. “I don’t want anyone to feel the way I did,” they say. “I want people who do feel the way I did to know that it’s OK. That they’re not broken.“
Saga's desk and vlogging setup. The asexuality pride flag is visible next to the microphone they've used to record five years of conversations.
The experience of being asexual, Saga says, is frequently misunderstood even by people who are trying to be kind. The diagnosis people reach for is hormonal imbalance. What asexuals actually want, according to Saga, is to be accepted as they are. “I didn’t think I deserved that,” they say. “Because asexuality is framed as a lack of something, as opposed to experiencing it differently.”
A friend once tried to explain what it felt like to be hypersexual, describing how she could look at a stranger on the street and immediately fantasize about them. Saga listened, genuinely baffled. “I literally don’t like being romantically or sexually attracted. It’s annoying. I don’t know how anyone does anything during the day.”
Saga in their living room, which they share with roommates they met online.
They’ve built an online community for “ace” folks, a shorthand for asexuals. They get messages ranging from teenagers asking if they’re too young to identify as asexual to people in their sixties who say having awareness about asexuality would have helped them understand a marriage, or exit one. What strikes Saga most about those messages is the relief people express in having found others like them.
Marina De Buchi grew up in the UK dreaming about California. The 30-year-old jewelry brand owner, who is Christian and conservative-leaning, watched The Hills as a kid and thought it looked like “freedom.” She has that word tattooed on the back of her neck
It took her five years and a lot of money to finally get to the Golden State, arriving with two suitcases and moving in with three other women after finding a room on Facebook. All four women are virgins and have joked about calling their home the nunnery.
De Buchi's closet in her bedroom. She came to the US from the UK and took to the West Coast aesthetic immediately.
“I don’t like to make a big deal out of waiting till marriage,” says De Buchi, who has traveled to over 20 countries alone. “In my friend group, everyone is. It’s very normal.” One of her friends runs an event called Hot, Holy, Healed for Christian women, where De Buchi sells her jewelry under her own name. The brand gives 10 percent of each sale to anti-trafficking organizations, she says.
For De Buchi, the mission connects directly to how she thinks about sex itself. “There’s such a sexualized culture and perversion more than ever,” she says, “and people think that means more freedom. But I actually think it’s the opposite.”
At the same time, she didn’t think she’d be waiting this long to have sex, having assumed she’d be married in her early twenties.
She met her boyfriend on Hinge a year and a half ago. She was upfront about her own abstinence from the beginning. They don’t have sleepovers. “I don’t want to play house with someone before I marry them,” she says. “I think that’s something you should look forward to.”
Photo memories with her boyfriend at the end of her bed.
She’s launching a podcast called The Gypsy Virgin, because she couldn’t find anything that addressed the practical reality of preparing for sex after marriage when you’ve been waiting your whole life. She reads about sex, she owns lingerie, she dances—small ways of staying connected to a sexuality she plans to use. “I think for a long time I probably did suppress that,” she says, “because it’s probably easier. But I want to be connected to myself.“
De Buchi wants to be clear that she is not just sitting around waiting for a husband. She has a business, a mission, a community. “Someone shouldn’t complete you,” she says. “They should add to your life.“
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